Scholar alumnus builds robots to help children

His name is Nico and he can do what most 1-year-olds can do. Recognize himself in a mirror. Distinguish between himself and others. Manipulate simple toys. Talk. Look you right in the eye.

But, even in his Yale cap and T-shirt, it's obvious Nico is not like most year-old children. Not like any. He's not a child at all.

He's a robot.

"Nico can do a lot, but obviously we're not making any claims of self-awareness or consciousness," says the man who helped build Nico, Brian Scassellati, an associate professor of computer science at Yale University.

But what Nico does is important. The robot is part of a major research effort by Scassellati and his colleagues to determine the usefulness of humanlike robots in diagnosing and, perhaps, some day treating serious development problems among children.

Scassellati -- he is known as "Scaz" among students at Yale -- works with experts at Yale Medical School to bring together robots and children suffering from disorders like autism.

"The robots are especially good at measuring the social responses of these children, like eye contact and verbal behavior," says the young researcher, who grew up in Phillipsburg.

"Often, if these children went to three different doctors, they would be given three different diagnoses. Robots are far more consistent and objective in what they can record and measure."

Although he is not a psychologist, Scassellati says he has been interested in how children learn since he was a child. He earned four degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- two bachelor's degrees, including one in cognitive science, a master's degree in engineering and a doctorate in computer science.

Scassellati studied at MIT with the assistance of an award from the Star-Ledger Scholars program. He won the honor in 1990 as a senior at Phillipsburg High School.

His doctoral research synthesized all of his interests -- learning, computers and engineering -- by studying how robots could be built to display humanlike social behavior. Scassellati sought to find out a "theory of mind" that could be used to develop humanoid machines.

"I studied the social development of children so that it could be copied in the creation of a machine," says Scassellati, 36.

As he studied the social behavior of children of various ages, he made a discovery: Development stops at about the 3-year-old level for children diagnosed with autism.

"I started out trying to determine what we could learn about robotics from children, but it led to trying to determine what we could learn about arrested social development from robots."

In 2001, he was hired by Yale as a computer science faculty member; it was precisely where he wanted to be.
"Yale Medical School was doing a lot of work on autism research," he says. "This is what I wanted to do, too. I wanted to be involved in learning what we could do to change the diagnosis and treatment of autism."

Robotics is a popular field in both universities and commercial ventures. Scassellati, who helped run the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, knew men and women in his field could become rich developing robotic devices that could be used for a variety of functions in homes and businesses.

"But I was excited about what robotics might teach us about a very serious condition that affects so many children. I love what I do. I wouldn't do anything else."

Much of his work is simply the slow accumulation of data over time to build a knowledge base that would allow researchers to learn more about the nature of autism.

"It's a spectrum disorder," Scassellati explains. "Children diagnosed with it present a wide range of symptoms. I think eventually we're going to find out that what we call autism today is really 14 different things."

He and his colleagues have had success in using robots to measure symptoms and to distinguish among various kinds of behavior displayed by children diagnosed with autism.

"We have given clinicians some new tools in dealing with the disorder," he says.

But Scassellati, who has received extensive federal and private funding for his work, says researchers are "years and years away" from completing any work on how the use of robots might affect the behavior of children with autism.

"We do know that, in some cases, children act differently when they are with robots, but we know very little beyond that," he says.

Meanwhile, Scassellati has won a variety of awards for his work, and was invited last year to deliver a lecture to the National Academic of Sciences. His work has been published in scholarly journals devoted to computer science, engineering, and learning theory.

He and his wife, Kristi, have two children. She also is an expert in computer science, and together the couple runs a nonprofit organization called "Otherworld," which takes small groups of vacationers on role-playing adventure weekends in the Connecticut woods.